ClaimArticle

In practice, the freedom of open source mostly means leaning on other people to do the examining and modifying, because most people can't justify the time commitment to read and modify code themselves.

The author argues that even for expert programmers, the real value of open source has been delegating inspection and modification to others, since few can justify the time cost. ✦ AI generated

Author (Hacker News comment) · Simon Willison's Weblog · 2026-08-03 · original ↗

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The reality for most people - even expert programmers - has been that the freedom is more about being able to lean on other people to do that. Most people can't justify the time commitment needed to read and then modify the code for tools they use very often.

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The open-source ecosystem that underpins software is maintained by under-resourced volunteers, so the burden ultimately falls on users to vet the artifacts they deploy — and the industry must move toward faster patching.Dylan · a16z Podcast · conf 65%

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provides context → Getting software to compile in order to hack on it used to be enough friction that I often wouldn't bother, but now I treat building and checkout as a zero-time-investment challenge delegated to Codex or Claude Code.Author (Hacker News comment) · Simon Willison's Weblog provides context → I routinely prompt Claude to clone a GitHub repo and explain how part of it works.Author (Hacker News comment) · Simon Willison's Weblog provides context → LLMs have changed the equation in a way that makes the original open-source dream of examining and modifying code much more feasible.Author (Hacker News comment) · Simon Willison's Weblog provides context → I'm not habitually modifying the software I use yet, but I can see a path to that which didn't exist a year or so ago.Author (Hacker News comment) · Simon Willison's Weblog